Quotes from Anthony Storr

Narcissists are bound to feel that their own death is the end of everything that really matters.

What music expresses, is eternal, infinite and ideal; it does not express the passion, love, or longing of such-and-such an individual on such-and-such an occasion, but passion, love or longing in itself, and this it presents in that unlimited variety of motivations, which is the exclusive and particular characteristic of music, foreign and inexpressible to any other language.

Music is a temporal art. Its patterns exist in time and require duration for their development and completion. Although painting and architecture and sculpture make statements about relationships between space, objects, and colours, these relationships are static.

Music more aptly represents human emotional processes because music, like life, appears to be in constant motion.

Domestic music-making has declined in recent years; but those who still engage in it know that making music together is an irreplaceable way of achieving closeness. The members of a string quartet sometimes develop a special intimacy which they claim is unmatched by any other relationship.

Blacking believes that 'feeling with the body' is as close as anyone can get to resonating with another person.

By arousal, I mean a condition of heightened alertness, awareness, interest, and excitement: a generally enhanced state of being.

Are our encounters with music in any way comparable with encountering persons?

The theory that composers embody their own feelings in a composition which then transmits those feelings direct to the listener was earlier dismissed as incomplete and unconvincing.

During arousal, the electrical resistance of the skin is diminished; the pupil of the eye dilates; the respiratory rate may become either faster or slower, or else become irregular. Blood-pressure tends to rise, as does the heart rate. There is an increase in muscular tone, which may be accompanied

Stravinsky's ideal was to create works in which the personal dimension is eliminated, which is why Constant Lambert condemned his neoclassical work as inhuman and mechanical.

Getting to know a difficult piece of music is comparable with getting to know a person who does not immediately reveal him- or herself, or who may appear to erect barriers against intimacy.

Psycho-analysts usually refer to this process as introjecting a good object; meaning by this that the attachment figure has become part of the individual's inner world, and therefore someone on whom he can rely even though the person concerned is not actually present.

But no other composer, to my mind, has a greater capacity to dispel irritation or banish a mood of depression. There

Wagner's music has the power to plumb new depths and uncover passions never before consciously experienced

At an emotional level, there is something 'deeper' about hearing than seeing; and something about hearing other people which fosters human relationships even more than seeing them.

One of Freud's cardinal errors was to suppose that what human beings most wanted was a state of tranquillity following the discharge of all tensions. He treated powerful emotions as an intrusion, whether they were instigated by stimuli from without or caused by instinctual impulses from within. For Freud, the main function of the central nervous system was to see that the tensions caused by such emotions were discharged, either

am sure that one of the reasons why music affects us deeply is its power to structure our auditory experience and thus to make sense out of it. Although I have been at pains to dispel the psychoanalytic view that music is an escape from reality or a regression to an infantile state, there is no doubt that music provides one path of temporary withdrawal from the hurly-burly of the external world.

In solitude What happiness? Who can enjoy alone, Or all enjoying what contentment find?' Milton

Charismatic individuals, such as Wagner, open the doors of our perceptions, transcend our limitations, and reveal mysteries unknown to us.

But listening to or participating in music can restore a person to himself, as the epigraph to this chapter suggests. People need to recapture what has been excluded during working hours: their subjectivity.

Othello's suicide is profoundly moving; but it does not make us feel suicidal. What moves us is the way in which Shakespeare (and Verdi) made sense out of tragedy by making it part of an artistic whole. As Nietzsche realized, even tragedy is an affirmation of life.

Another reason for annoyance is being unable to identify the music. I once spent a considerable period of time vainly searching through the scores of Haydn's quartets, convinced that the tune which was preoccupying me was the slow movement of one of them. It turned out to be from his 88th Symphony, which I had not heard for a long time.

We can let it have its way, or we can direct it to our will; we can force it into new paths, or we can rehearse familiar works; we can listen to it, or we can relegate it to our subconscious; but we can never get rid of it. For one so endowed – or so burdened – to live is to live music.25